Charles Moore Charles Moore

Trimble may prove to be Unionism’s last statesman

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David Trimble, who has just died, has rightly been praised for his courage. History may prove him to have been Unionism’s last statesman. But the well-known people who sincerely eulogised him this week – Tony Blair, Bill Clinton, Jonathan Powell – all helped end his career. There are many good things to be said for the Belfast Agreement, and no one said them better than David, but it achieved at least one big, bad thing: it undermined moderation in Ulster politics. By persuading Trimble to move so far, Blair and co separated him from his political roots. This broke Trimble’s Unionists and empowered the much more sectarian followers of Ian Paisley. A comparable process on the other side weakened the non-violent SDLP and fulfilled Sinn Fein/IRA’s once-impossible dream of becoming the main nationalist party in Northern Ireland. Some say this tamed the extremes. I wonder. What Paisleyites and Sinn Fein excel at is fighting for their tribe’s share of the spoils. They are rival gangs, jealously protecting their own manors. This is not stable, and it is not true peace.

Before the BBC Tory leadership debate on Monday night got rather heated, Rishi Sunak began with good words about Lord Trimble, which Liz Truss echoed. Following his example, I started my interview with Mr Sunak in this paper with a related question. Trimble’s last interventions in public life concerned the Northern Ireland Protocol. In his view, it violated two aspects of the Agreement of which he was especially proud. One was the East/West dimension (i.e. the relationship between Northern Ireland and mainland Britain). He was a true British Unionist, after all, not just an Ulster one. The other was the principle of consent for all changes in the constitutional status of Northern Ireland. No such consent for the Protocol was ever sought.

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